Modulus of hypertrees

Abstract

Lorea [11] and later Frank et al. [8] generalized graphic matroids to hypergraphic matroids. In [8], the authors introduced hypertrees as a generalization of spanning trees and proved a form of the theorem of Tutte [18] and Nash-Williams [14]. In [3, 15, 17], the authors explored the modulus of the family of spanning trees in graphs and of the family of bases of matroids, and provided connections to the notions of strength and fractional arboricity. They also established Fulkerson duality for these families. In this paper, we extend these results to hypertrees, and show that the modulus of hypertrees uncovers a hierarchical structure within arbitrary hypergraphs.